Computer-aided design (CAD) systems provide the engineer with the capability to design and test products via computer simulation. Many CAD systems are geared towards generic circuit simulation with little or no support for system-specific design. Generic CAD systems often contain hundreds of functions in order to be general-purpose. The engineer using this type of system must acquire a working knowledge of most of these functions in order to use the tool. This leaves the engineer in the unenviable position of first learning the intricacies of the tool, which can take weeks or months, before any development can begin.
A second disadvantage of the generic CAD system, stemming again from the generality, is the fact that the system does not constrain the engineer to use the tool in a way that will yield rapid prototype designs. This is due in large part to effort creating system-specific libraries of elements, rather than designing the actual circuit to be prototyped. The effort put forth creating libraries increases as the complexity of the prototype increases.
The present invention provides a method and apparatus for the computer-aided design of RF modular hybrid packages. The method comprises the steps of initializing standardized front- and back-plane models, adding input/output instances along the perimeter of the back-plane, designing the hybrid circuit on the front-plane and combining the two planes to arrive at an RF modular hybrid layout design. A data library of RF hybrid elements is provided to facilitate rapid prototyping.